Tactical dialectics and epistemological change

Last week we talked about Lefebvre’s project of seeing how everyday life has changed over time through a dialectical tension between domination or alienation and residues or traces of something else that can be recovered. In one of my earlier writings I noted that a lot of the meaning (if not all) that we derive from the present (every)day comes from its comparison to the past, which can be real or imagined. I think we talked about this in class last week as well, with Lefebvre’s hovering between nostalgic practices as debilitating and yet looking to an imagined rural past himself. The downside to such nostalgia was pointed out to me in a shockingly clear way while reading Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew for the other class I’m taking this semester. In it, Sartre argues (among other things) that French anti-Semitism is largely a product of the petty-bourgeois remaining stuck to rural traditions and beliefs while the world moves on to more abstract and complex ways of organizing social and economic life. This class’s failure to find an authentic means of interacting with their world leads them to essentially scapegoat Jews, whom they identify through a constructed sense of ethnic identity based in purity and difference. If I’m reading both authors correctly, I think Lefebvre would critique Sartre’s insistence on authenticity as an existential necessity for a meaningful life for its privileging of individualistic modes of thought, while agreeing with the general approach of a class-based analysis. In any event, Sartre’s analysis points to a constructed sense of national or ethnic pride rooted in a nostalgic yearning for a past that may or may not have existed. The danger of nostalgia when it becomes a non-critical mode of developing meaning in the everyday comes from the potential to lead to a brand of identity politics that relies on narratives of an historic and (by this logic) untouchable purity threatened by defiling chaos or otherness. The response to this threat is a reactionary sense of purpose that finds expression in Nazism or other forms of ethnic nationalism. Of course not all nostalgias lead to such an extreme expression of this dialectic between sameness and difference, past and present (difference because of the threat of impurity or promise of change, sameness because of meaning still expressed in residue or through memory). Similar to Lefebvre’s argument that we discussed in class that everyday life has a multiplicity of meanings existing in different registers or epistemologies, DeCerteu’s description of the difference between tactics and strategies appears to open up another way of imagining the relationship between past and present, and the meaning-making that we engage in based on this tension.

DeCerteu describes the difference as one between spatial logic (strategies) and temporal or opportunistic (non)logic (34 – 39), and remarks that “the space of the tactic is the space of the other” and that tactics have “a mobility that must accept the chance offerings of the moment” (37). The spatial non-home of tactics can be read in two ways: one, that they exist in the domains and spaces already occupied by others (those in power), or, that they exist in the space of the othered, meaning that if there is a space it is outside the realm recognized by strategic bodies or intellects (nations, governments, institutions, etc.). …

(The paradox here, as we noted last week with Lefebvre that there really is no “outside” to everyday life, meaning that the life of the other exists alongside that which is fully recognized, but is invisible except as an ontological exterior contained but not really seen in its entirety by the strategic domain. This is like the relationship between the Jew and anti-Semite described by Sartre: “Jewishness” as such, like any racial essentialism, does not exist except as a social or cultural construction. However, the anti-Semite (or American white supremacist, etc.) latches on to particular abstract characteristics, which are then sought out and identified, even if they are minor or imaginary parts of a person’s character. Incidentally, this deductive pattern of thought seems similar to any abstract theory as DeCerteu and Lefebvre critique them). …

This interiorized outsideness means that the tactical has no stability and lives in moments, instead of spaces, making them harder to recognize and understand as effective displacements or challenges to strategic power. In a particular way, they exist in a different epistemological realm, but one that is densely intertwined with the strategic (sort of like Lefebvre’s water and wine model as opposed to oil and water). DeCerteu writes on page fifty that “our ‘tactics’ seem to be analyzable only indirectly, through another society: the France of the Ancien Régime or the nineteenth century, in the case of Foucault; Kabylia or Béarn.” Part of what I think he means here is that tactics are only recognizable after they have morphed previous strategies into something new and different, and that those tactics when they do have a critical mass to create strategic change, may not have an effect desired by their practitioners. As DeCerteu notes, the judicial reforms of the eighteenth century worked partially through a rhetoric of equality and proportionate punishment, but their ultimate effect was to establish a new strategy of control founded on taxonomic delineations of public space (46); the tactics of reform (or the crowd protests and occasional rescue of condemned prisoners that Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish as one impetus for the reform) created the need for a strategic response in which the spatial arrangement of power was adjusted, and tactical challenges were again displaced. Therefore, we see that tactics drive strategic change, while simultaneously carving out moments in which other forms or practices of everyday life can be expressed. This conception of tactics and strategies re-writes the relationship between past and present, in which they are not diametrically opposed, but somehow exist in a dialectical tension. If we imagine strategies as the residual effects of past tactics, then current tactics derive their meaning in the present from that past by responding to the strategic organization of space. This shift allows us to see the history of everyday life as a history of tactics that become or create strategies, rather than just strategies dominating tactical responses. Instead of a nostalgic sense of purity, responding to the past becomes a practice of creating futures without certainty about the shape they will take. Foucault notes this dynamic in The Order of Things, which DeCerteu briefly mentions, arguing that epistemological change occurs without direction, and is recognizable only after we have effectively established a new form of life. Thinking about the change that has occurred in our lives because of digital technologies over the past 20 years, this seems to make sense.

-Andy DuMont